NORKIS Group, a leading conglomerate in the Philippines best known for motorcycles, multipurpose cabs, light van and small car production and distribution, recently partnered with IBM to work on and implement a smarter business system to enable its rapid nationwide growth.

Based on the statement released by IBM, the Norkis Group has tapped IBM Global Technology Services for a centralized system that will coordinate the business operations of the company.

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"What tipped us towards the IBM solution was the superior virtualization functionality offered by the Power Systems platform. With Power Systems, we can work with IBM Global Technology Services to create additional virtual servers on the p5-550s and simply add suitable disk capacity as required. This is a considerable cost saving, not to mention the reduction in complexity," Luis Quisumbing, deputy chair of Norkis Group, said.

The Norkis Group also opted for an IBM Systems Storage DS4700 to provide application and data storage. The DS4700 can be expanded to a total of 33.6TB, offering significant growth options for the immediate and near future.

"With the solutions deployed, separate manual or semi-automated systems for business reporting and control have been replaced with shared, standardized information services based on highly reliable infrastructure," Quisumbing said.

Moreover, the Norkis Group believes that with IBM solutions in place, the efficiency of the company will increase as there will be easy access to accurate data for the staff, faster tracking of transactions, and customer profile.

"We can also identify and understand the behaviors of our most profitable and largest customers, helping us to direct our sales towards new sectors and develop new offerings," Quisumbing said.

Starting out as the country's exclusive manufacturer and distributor of Yamaha motorcycles in 1962, the Norkis Group has since diversified its product range and expanded to over 300 branch locations.

With a centralized ERP solution, the Norkis Group would be better equipped to forecast demand, increase on-time delivery, reduce credit investigation lead-times, and make realistic and achievable commitments. This would open avenues for new businesses and growth strategies.

An IBM Power Systems server was tapped for the SAP ERP application and a second server for SAP Customer Relationship Management. Using IBM PowerVM virtualization functionality, these two servers provide separate environments for each application, which can have appropriate compute and system resources allocated in order to meet service level agreements.

"We take pride in successfully replacing Norkis Group's diverse and decentralized systems with an integrated smarter system to meet their business growth agenda. The flexibility of the IBM Power System platform and IBM's Integrated Virtualization Manager allow us to create several distinct operating environments for the new ERP system instead of purchasing additional servers," James Velasquez, IBM country manager, said. (CPM/With press release)